Direct Livestream....away with YouTube

Jitsi,Jibri,RocketChat,OBS

There's too much lag using YouTube Livestream with Rocketchat.  We have a teacher/student forum (channel) with only teacher able to livestream.

Seems YouTube Streaming is hard-coded into Rocketchat, and Teacher's stream has usual 3-5sec RTMP lag even with low-latency setting on youtube studio.

I currently have a RocketChat Server setup with NGINX RTMP module.  Essentially, a web server with ability to accept direct streams.

The Rocketchat Channel has an admin menu item to turn on Livestream in channel your in and to enter your livestream url permanently.

I'm assuming I should be able to stream from OBS or JIBRI directly to my Rocketchat Server and pick up stream in RC Channel with localhost URL.

It seems NGINX provides the tools to accomplish this and wondering if anyone stuck in similar situation with a direct stream instead of forced to use YouTube Livestream.



 

NGINX does not provide the tools to have a "direct livestream." If you want to ditch YouTube, you need something to replace its role as the viewer-facing server– an HLS server. NGINX can function as both an RTMP server (for input) and an HLS server (for output) at the same time. My video here shows how to set up an NGINX HLS server (together with RTMP): https://nerdonthestreet.com/episode/tech/hls-streaming-server

spiritwalker said

I'm assuming I should be able to stream from OBS or JIBRI directly to my Rocketchat Server and pick up stream in RC Channel with localhost URL.

- OBS can stream to an NGINX RTMP server. Jibri cannot, since it is hard-coded to only stream to YouTube (a terrible decision.) They are considering removing this absolutely arbitrary limitation here and here.
- RocketChat's current streaming feature appears to be written specifically for YouTube as well, since it asks for a Google API key in the settings page. Additionally, the playback side is also hard-coded to YouTube, so even if you managed to stream to a different location, you would not be able to play back from that other location within the RocketChat interface.

I think you're better off doing things yourself with OBS, NGINX, and your own HTML page, unless you're ready to modify the source code for these tools to work with your servers instead of YouTube.